Casts & Slings
by seriousish
Summary: Marie meets another survivor.


Marie had a police scanner. She listened to the sightings of Heisenberg around town, knowing from the dispatcher's weary tone that each was most likely another false alarm, and it got harder and harder to resist the urge to jump in her car and drive to one of those addresses. If she saw Walter, she'd run him down in the street. Hank would like that. He'd always made jokes about her being a poor driver.

She also had a cell phone. She'd called Skyler a few times, just to check up on her, keep her up to date on what she knew of the police response, but there wasn't much to tell or much to say. She wanted to text Skyler something positive, upbeat—there was a book of daily affirmations that her mother gave to her at Hank's funeral, but when she flipped through the pages, each one seemed like the punchline to a joke.

"Life isn't about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself." Easy for the book to say—some reporter or ghost writer taking an easy-money gig to repeat whatever people were writing on Pinterest. She didn't feel created, at least not by herself. She felt like the sum of other people's misery… sustained on the life support of Hank's memory and Skyler's pain.

The knock at the door came late at night. She hadn't even tried to go to bed; she knew she wouldn't sleep. The wine bottle she'd been abusing was also empty. She had three more waiting, but hadn't gotten up from her little nest of police scanner and Skyler's quick-dial.

The knock came too violent and sudden to be someone bringing her news or a lost pizza boy. She got up, hanging onto the bottle and dimly thinking of it as a weapon. If it were Walter, would she smash it across his head? Or would she smash it against something else and try to force the jagged end into his throat?

The knob turned lazily and the door lolled open before she could decide. It wasn't Walter. It wasn't anyone, not for a moment. Not through the bruises, the gaunt cheeks, the dark bags under his eyes. But then Marie saw.

It took her a second to place most people she'd met in the storm after Hank; they seemed so unimportant. Not him. She saw him and she was back all those months, back in warm water, when Hank was alive and they'd actually had a shot at making everything right. Jesse. The third member of their team, back when they'd been a team.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, and wasn't even sure what she meant. Here and not living it up in Vegas with some share of some loot? Here and not in a shallow grave? Here and not at Walter's side, pulled back in like he'd said so many times on the tape, a beaten dog that always went home.

"Nowhere else to go." His voice scratched on the way out. It had claws. "I just need to lie down for a minute—please—lie down for a minute. Then I'll go."

She couldn't say anything to that. She just moved out of the way and he clattered into her home—she could see his bones working under his skin—his arms and legs moving stiffly like he was relearning to walk. She could see sharp bands on his skin where what could only be manacles had gone. He didn't even rub at the welts. They seemed as much a part of him as Marie's wedding ring was of her.

He went to the living room; she hadn't redecorated after Hank's death and no one had expected her to. The couch was there, but he didn't even seem to see it before collapsing into it. Like this was the extent of his plan. He curled up; it struck her how shallow his breathing was. It lengthened by degrees, like a song rising.

"Just a minute—I'll be on my way—just a minute."

She could see the energy that had brought him here trailed behind him, a jittery haze of an aura that extended all the way to the car parked on the curb outside. It was a junker, but not wholly suspicious. He'd been wise enough to park it a few space away, in front of a house for sale. One of her neighbors who couldn't cope with the sporadic tightening of the press on the street.

Marie couldn't sympathize. She'd gotten used to it. Gotten used to worse, too.

She shut her door, locked it tight, and traced Jesse's steps back to the curled up bug on the couch. One of the couch's two cushions was under his head, the other was in his arms, clenched as tightly as a child's teddy bear.

Marie had thought up a thousand scenarios—what else was there to do? If Jesse had been in on it with Walter. If he'd been responsible, even unintentionally. If he'd been on the run, without even the decency to face her and tell her how her husband had died. That was the only thing left to know. Everything else was as exposed as an open wound; the only comfort remaining was knowing if it had been quick and painless or—

She knew what drug cartels did. She knew what it meant when there were no bodies. You were supposed to wonder. That was the point.

And there he was. Her answer. Asleep on her couch in under a minute. She should've shaken him awake, should've tied him up somehow so he couldn't run again, should've called the police and let them have him. But that weight in her heart that she'd touched so many times, she'd just taken to assuming it was still there—it wasn't. She could stand not knowing. A little while longer. She could let him sleep, even though she couldn't. Because she couldn't.

Marie went to the kitchen. When Hank had called her—it seemed like millennia ago, a prehistoric time that she had evolved out of in painful stages—she'd wanted to celebrate. She'd wanted to commemorate this shadow coming off their heads. A pizza seemed insufficient. So, after talking to Skyler—after feeling one more piece of her, their lives click into place rebuilt like a puzzle—she had gone to the store and bought an entire shopping cart of groceries. A pork roast, she'd thought. They'd have Gomez over, whoever else in the DEA wanted to come, and they'd all eat and laugh and roughhouse and it wouldn't wear on Marie, not one bit, because with every off-color joke and poke to the rib they'd be pressing this day indelibly into their collective memory. Not all the days they'd missed Walter White. The one where they'd finally gotten him.

She had never started on the recipe. By the time she had the groceries set out, the doubt had caught her. Then the slow, sinking realization. It had taken hours, and when Skyler had finally called to give Marie her news, it'd been a relief like an cracked bone finally snapping. At least she had stopped worrying. The pain had burnt it all out of her.

Now the simple work of the preparation and the focus it required was surprisingly meditative. Like slipping into a warm bath, the repetition of lining the roasting pan with foil and mixing the ingredients and rubbing the garlic result all over the pork. Then having it in the oven, just watching the timer tick down. It felt right. It wasn't right, nothing would ever be quite right, but it was at least a faded echo of that puzzle piece clicking into place. Less wrong.

She'd once listened to the radio as she cooked. She did that now. Turned it on low, to avoid waking Jesse, and heard what passed for pop music these days. It was catchy and dry and compromising enough. She let it stir her distantly; while she hardly moved, sitting at the kitchen table, her toes tapped.

The DJ cut in while she was lost in thoughts; it took her a moment to collect his voice from her own swaying inner monologue. She liked the 104.5 evening DJ—he had a German accent that went adorable when he was excited. Now it was simply dour. He announced the death of Walter White, the story broken by fucking TMZ. She supposed that meant Walt was a celebrity. He would've loved that.

The DJ promised more news as it developed, then played a Katy Perry song. Marie took her roast out of the oven.

Jesse came into the kitchen just as she was garnishing with rosemary sprigs; woken by the smell, she guessed. Marie could hear his stomach rumbling. She pulled out a plate for him from the cupboard, but he walked right past her to the sink. Turned it on full blast and doused himself with cupped hands full of water. Over and over again, flooding his face and hair and arms and neck.

Without the grime, he actually looked like one of the living instead of a walking corpse, but one eye was still swollen shut and some of the cuts on his face looked downright infected. Marie made a mental note to use the first aid kit, see what she could do about preventing any further illness beyond what he was clearly already suffering. First, she wanted him calmed down a little more. For all his weariness, there was still a hurt energy in him that made her feel he'd throw himself right out the window if spooked.

"Walter's gone," she said, and felt ridiculous using the euphemism. "Dead."

He stared at her, his good eye hardly wavering. She was expecting a flood of emotions; or at least one or two. Nothing. He didn't seem to process it at all. It just stuck on his face, a kind of confusion. But then, slowly, it thawed. He believed her. He accepted it. He gave a bit of a nod.

"But you don't care."

"Not anymore," she answered truthfully. "How…" She trailed off in the face of a sniffle from him. It wasn't for Heisenberg. It was because it was over. He finally believed it was over. He didn't cry, but he shook, his body trying to do something, anything, with whatever signals his brain was firing off.

She took him by the hand and led him to the table, as gentle as she'd been holding Skyler's newborn baby. He sat; then, drained, he sprawled almost out of the chair. She watched him warily, but he seemed stable enough. She set a plate before him, but he didn't touch it despite another bass-deep rumble from his stomach. He was watching her closely, his eyes almost closed.

"You want to know what happened?"

She could only nod.

He rubbed at his face some with his hand—his good hand. The way the other one hung, it seemed to have been broken and set wrong. Probably hurt even now. Marie tried to keep her mind off that and on his face. The way it scrunched up weakly, conjuring up that day. She wondered if it was because he tried not to think about it, or because he thought about it so often that it was hard to put into words.

Marie pushed the plate closer to him, the squeal of its bottom on the table loud and abrasive. Waiting. More waiting. When had she gotten so patient? "Eat."

He could do as told, at least. Working his good hand around his fork, he speared a piece. She had cut it without thinking. He shoved it into his mouth and just let it stay there, percolating, before he chewed. His head lowered—a kid trying ice cream for the first time. She felt an urge to reach out and nestle her hand into his hair. One of those little maternal gestures that she'd never found a home for, she just annoyed everyone else by trying to baby them. She figured it would be the same with him. She refrained.

He swallowed dryly and spoke. It seemed even harder for him than before—like he was choking on broken glass. "You know how it started?" And took another bite.

If it would make it easier on him to have a little less to tell… "You, Hank, and Gomez—you set a trap for Walt. He drove out into the desert and you followed him. And you had him. You had him." She said it like it was his fault, Jesse, the one moving part she didn't trust. The blame she couldn't keep out of her voice stilled her. The rest didn't need saying anyway. That they'd died.

"Yeah… we had him." Jesse set his fork down, the tiny noise like a musical note. A smile so light it could've been sketched with a pencil. "I spat in his face. You know about the Nazis? White's… fucking minions." For the first time, a sign of life, and it was all anger. "He must've called them, because they came running. Then he said he didn't want them there…" His head turned from side to side. "I never could tell what was true with him. Not all the way."

That'd been on the radio. Something about Walt being found at a white supremacist compound. It was all pulling together. Like a bone healing.

"Yeah… Walt said he wanted to call it off, but they didn't listen. They started shooting—I hid—Hank and Gomie shot back. Gomez died in the firefight. Hank took a bullet in the leg. They wanted him to beg; he didn't. Told 'em to fuck off. They shot him. They shot him in the head, Marie."

The words hurt. No matter how Marie had expected them, how she was ready for them, she couldn't smooth out a path for them into her heart. They came in angry and barbed, cutting all the way down. Until they were home, set in her soul, damage done but at least there was nowhere else for them to go. She still felt the marks they had made, all the way down to the core of her, but—they didn't hurt as much as she'd feared.

"And then?" It seemed like such a small question—what could matter after that?—but once she asked, the words stopped buzzing around her head.

"The money Mr. White went there to get—they took it. Left him with a little. They found me and… they took me too. Made me cook meth for them. I didn't want to, but they…"

His eye could no longer bore into hers. It wandered to a window and watched the black. Even in the confessional this had become, there was some suffering that was simply his.

"But I did. Until Walter came back. He said he wanted to cook for them again, but that was just to get in the door. I guess he said something about them betraying him by keeping me alive, because they hauled me out to show to him. Like the catch of the day, I guess. Then… he must've had some kind of gun rigged up… I don't know. Heisenberg's magic. There were bullets everywhere. It killed everyone except for… the one I got."

Jesse swallowed heavily. Not with guilt, but with a strained release. He looked at her like prey eying a predator, but she was lost in her own thoughts. The men who killed Hank; dead. No trials, no lawyers, no jail time. Just… carried away.

Like everything with Walt, it was a blessing with a price tag. She would've wanted to look them in the eyes while the judge gave them the death sentence, one at a time; give interviews on Oprah while their appeals were denied and denied and denied. Watch through the glass as the needle went in, time and time again.

"And Walter?"

"He took one in the confusion. He tried to get me to put him out of his misery, but… no such thing as a free lunch, right? I left." Those words must've seemed impossible to him, because he repeated them wonderingly. "I left." His eye came back to her, focusing for the first time in a while. "You going to turn me in?"

It took Marie a moment to realize he was talking to her. As if he were speaking to God. She shook her head. "No," she added.

"Hank's dead because of me. They're all dead because of me. If I had just gone through with the sting…"

"Then you might be dead too," Marie finished for him. "It wasn't your fault. It wasn't—"

Suddenly he was up, out of his chair, running to the sink. He couldn't keep down the rich meal. It came out into the stream of tap-water he turned on. He choked on it, sputtered, coughed, until he spat the last of it out. Then he turned and found himself in Marie's embrace.

The tap ran as the smaller woman squeezed him tight, the pressure filtering pain through his many wounds, but replacing it soon with a kind of relief. He was out. He was still out. He had no right to expect anything more than a taste of freedom before he was whisked into another jail. But here he was. Safe. Free. Forgiven, almost.

His deepening breaths rasped as he took them, pushing Marie out then pulling her back in. He would've sobbed, but he'd spent enough nights doing that, past the point of caring if he showed weakness, knowing it would make no difference in the cruelty shown him. So he just closed his eyes, let his mind escape the scarred now, felt only the hands pressed to his back so tight he could feel the flesh-warm ring through his shirt.

It seemed they stayed like that a long time, but before he knew it he'd been laid back to the table and seated. Marie stood over him, a little self-conscious of their intimacy. She scrubbed her face of the tears that'd stained it. He hadn't even noticed she'd been crying.

"Soup, I think." She nodded to herself. "Yeah, you'll be able to keep some soup down." She went to the pantry, keeping on her prattle, half to him and half to herself. Jesse laid his head down on the table. He listened to the white noise. It was as soothing as the tide. "My father was a bit of a crook himself—still is, not really, but I don't lend him money. He lives in Atlanta and he owes me one from, you know, raising me. Or not. I think he could help you, once I get you to him." Jesse heard some beeping—looking up, he saw it was the microwave. Inside, a bowl of soup was spinning. "I'll finish the roast. And my sister will probably be over, I'll put the rest in the fridge for her. I don't have any soda… you like beer? My husband used to brew his own. I still have some. I still have all of it."

Jesse lifted his head. He sat up straight. Nodded. "I could go for a beer. If it's Hank's… I bet it's pretty good."

"I'm more of a wine lady, but. Yes. It's not bad."

She went to the garage for it, came back to find that he'd gotten the soup out of the microwave himself and was slowly, carefully spooning it into his mouth. She settle the bottle in front of him quietly, so as not to disturb him. She left the label, Hank's grinning picture, facing away from them both.

"No one's ever taken care of me before." He didn't ask for sympathy with the words. It was a simple statement of fact.

She put her hand in his hair. She'd half-expected him to flinch away, but his chi—whatever you wanted to call it—seemed to thrive on the contact. Each little touch putting a brick back in his foundation. She rubbed his scalp, spurred on by nothing more than the vibrant intensity of his need.

"So, you get to try something new, Jesse."

He looked down, bashful at the small endearment. At hearing his own name and not having it be a slur. When he looked back up, it was to reach for the bottle of Schraderbräu.

"Hey, uh…" With his entire being radiating wounded-animal gratitude, it was almost unnecessary for him to put his thanks into words, but he tried anyway. "This is a nice place you've got here. I really like the rocks and stuff."

She patted him once more on the head. "Yeah. They're minerals."


End file.
